Roughtime Protocol
Endpoints on the Internet often synchronize their clocks using the Network Time Protocol ( NTP). NTP provides precise synchronization, but is frequently deployed without a means of authentication. This is due in part to weaknesses in the cryptographic mechanisms used by the standard, but the added overhead also degrades precision on high-load servers. (See Dowling et al., USENIX ‘16.) As a result, a man-in-the-middle attacker can easily influence a victim’s clock. By moving them back in time, the attacker can, for example, force a victim to accept an expired (and possibly compromised) TLS certificate or session ticket.
For many applications, precise network time isn’t essential; to mitigate these kinds of attacks, it suffices to be accurate, say, within 10 seconds of real time. This observation is the primary motivation of Roughtime.
At its most basic level, Roughtime is a one-round protocol in which the client requests the current time and the server sends a signed response. The response is comprised of a timestamp (the number of microseconds since the Unix epoch) and a radius (in microseconds) used to indicate the server’s uncertainty about the reported time. For example, a radius of 1,000,000μs means the server is reasonably sure that the true time is within one second of the reported time.
The server proves freshness of its response as follows. The request consists of a short, random string called a nonce. which the server incorporates into its signed response so that the nonce is needed to verify the signature. If the nonce is sufficiently long (say, 16 bytes), then the number of possible nonces is so large that it’s extremely unlikely the server has encountered (or will ever encounter) a request with the same nonce. Thus, a valid signature serves as cryptographic proof that the response is fresh.
A client can get Roughtime from just one server it trusts, or it may contact many servers to make its calculation more robust. But the most distinctive feature of Roughtime is that it adds accountability to time servers: if a server misbehaves by providing inaccurate time, then the protocol allows clients to produce publicly verifiable proof of this misbehavior. More on this on the next page.